Democracy is future-oriented and self-correcting: today's problems can be solved, we are told, in tomorrow's elections. But the biggest issues facing the modern world – from climate collapse and pandemics to recession and world war – each apparently bring us to the edge of the irreversible. What happens to democracy when the future seems no longer open?

Jonathan White explores how politics has long been directed by shifting visions of the future, from the birth of ideologies in the nineteenth century to Cold War secrecy and the excesses of the neoliberal age.

He is in conversation with Professor Peter Allen, University of Bath.

About the speaker: Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. Based at LSE's European Institute, he has published widely on democracy and the politics of emergency. He has written for the Guardian and New Statesman, and received the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for Excellence in Political Science. He is the author of In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea.

This IPR event took place on 5 February 2025.

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